C/IL102Lab Fall 2007
Laboratory: Searching the Web
There are literally tens of millions of pages on the World Wide Web. Many of them have useful information on them. In this lab we will learn how to find things on the web. There are two sources of web information: 1) search engines and 2) directories. A search engine is a system that contains a “crawler”. A crawler is a program that automatically examines numerous web pages and obtains information from them. A directory is also a listing of information, but it usually is sent in by a person and evaluated by a committee of people. When you use either one of these systems, your query is compared to the information in their database and possibly relevant sites are listed for you to examine.
There are several major sites that provide either search engines or directories. Most of these are free to use. Since they are free the providers of these services must make money some way in order to stay in business. Typically they have certain sites that are “sponsored” which means that the sponsoring web site pays to be listed. In Google, for example, the sponsored sites are in a column on the right hand side of the page or near the top of the page with a light blue background. As you become a veteran web user you will find sites that you trust more than others. You may also find certain sites that are good for some searches but not for others.
About http://www.about.com/
AltaVista http://www.altavista.com/
Excite http://www.excite.com/
Google http://www.google.com/
HotBot http://www.hotbot.com/
Infoseek http://www.infoseek.com/
Lycos http://www.lycos.com/
Yahoo http://www.yahoo.com/
are among the largest and most famous. Yahoo is a directory with a search engine, all the others are search engines. Yahoo is the oldest search engine having started in 1994. Yahoo.com is the largest site on the Internet. For this Lab we will concentrate on Yahoo and Google. That choice is mostly arbitrary and has nothing to do with the merits of the search engines. My advice to you is to experiment with various search engines until you find the one that suits your personal taste. Altavista is the basic search engine that is incorporated into the University of Scranton's official web page. My personal choice for search engines is Google. I also use About when searching for technical information
There are other Web sites that are designed to allow individuals to search for very specific information. For example, if you wanted to read a review (or 75 reviews of the movie American Gangster, you might go to http://www.rottentomatoes.com. It is a Web site that is devoted to reviews of movies; http://www.epinions.com is a web site that contains consumer ratings of various items. So if you were considering buying a Nikon D40 digital camera, you could go to this site to find out what other individuals like yourself thought of this camera. If you buy items from online stores then you would probably go to http://www.resellerratings.com to find out what typical consumers think of various online stores.
Preliminary: There is a word document that you will use to hold the answers for this assignment. The name of the document is "web-srch.doc" (without the " marks). It is located in U:\cil-lab.
· Double Click My Computer
· Double Click Drive U.
· Double Click the folder Cil-Lab.
· Double Click Web-srch. This will run Word using Web-Srch.doc as the data file.
· Insert your name, the lab section and date
· You will be copying information from various web pages and pasting them into the word document as the lab progresses.
· You will also type information into the sheet when instructed to do so.
· You will turn in a printout of this document. Answers must be typed on the answer sheet. Handwritten answers on the answer sheet will NOT be graded.
Exercise 1. I need to write a paper for my computer literacy class on a famous historical person in the history of computing. I decide to write about Ada Lovelace. Use Google to find sources for this paper. A row for Google has already been filled out based on data obtained on November 5, 2006 but you should fill it out again based on current data. Fill out the Yahoo rows and the other two URL rows. For scholarly research, Google has a a new search engine, scholar.google.com to search scholarly articles that are available online. Some of these articles are not available without a subscription, so you may need to use the libarary’s facilities to find some articles. Use google scholar and list the first listing and the first online article which references this item.
In general to perform a search do the following:
· Start Internet Explorer.
· Click on File
· Select Open Page
· Type the URL in the box -- for example: http://www.google.com/
· Click open
· When you get to the page follow the instructions.
FOR TODAY'S ASSIGNMENT DO THE FOLLOWING AFTER LOADING IE.
· Choose the google search engine as described above. It is at http://www.google.com.
· For Google type Ada Lovelace into the search box and press the search button.
· When the list comes up remember the number of "hits", bring up the word document, and type it in using the same format given in the row above.
· Choose the first Web site and go there and glance at the article to see if it appears to be legitimate.
· At the oval buttons page, place your mouse pointer into the location box and click. This should highlight the URL. Press CTRL-C to copy the URL to the computer memory
· Bring up the word document, move the cursor to the line below where you type the answer to the previous question and press CTRL-V which should then paste the URL of the web page into your answer sheet.
· Now go to the Yahoo search engine at http://www.yahoo.com and repeat the process
· Go to this web site and type the number of hits into your word document, going to the second page suggested and copying the link into your word document.
· Now go to scholar.google.com and repeat the process, first listing the number or references and the first reference.
· Then choose the first reference and list the number of “hits”.
· Choose the first hit and click on the number of citatations. List it’s number of hits and the first hit listed
Exercise 2. Your instructor will have a specific exercise for you to do.
We will finish up by using the Web to find information that one doesn’t normally associate with web pages. We will use searching techniques to find businesses and to find addresses, driving directions, phone numbers and e-mail addresses for people.
Exercise 3. I will be visiting relatives in Chicago next month and my macintosh notebook computer has had one of the keys fall off. I need to get the computer repaired and can do this by bringing it to an apple store in Chicago. I need to find the phone number an address of one. Most search engines have yellow pages available from them. However we will pick one of the standard yellow page selections. One of my favorites is areaconnect.com. Connect with page http://chicago.areaconnect.com/ and find me an Apple Computer Store in Chicago, Ill. (name, address, and phone number). Enter the information to your Word document in the indicated place. NOTE that if you wish to search a different city just insert its name in place of chicago.
Exercise 4. I would like to take a trip to the white house this weekend for a short holiday. What is the driving mileage from here to there and what is the mileage back? Hint: Go to a search engine such as http://www.google.com/ and search for “road maps”. One of the first choices should be MapQuest, probably the best site for finding mileages and routes. Go there and choose Driving Directions. Enter the appropriate information to find a route from 800 Linden St. zip 18510, the official address of the University of Scranton, and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC. On the answer sheet print the mileage. Now find the mileage from the white house back to the U and print it on the sheet.
Exercise 5. Find out some stuff that I want to know. For each of the following questions give the answer and the URL of the web site from which the answer was obtained.
a) First find out about me (Dr. James Sidbury) and fill out the info on the answer sheet.
b) What are the average high and low temperatures for the month of November in Scranton, PA?
c) When ticket prices are adjusted for inflation, what was the fourth highest grossing movie of all time? How much did it gross when adjusted for dollars of the year 2000?
d) What was the closing price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average on September 17, 2007?
e) What was the most expensive music video to make? Approximately how much did it cost?
1